OK first and foremost this is not a criticism of GameGuru.

I am not by any measure a game designer. I simply do not have those skills. However, I am, or rather have been a programmer. I was in fact a programmer for EduTech Systems Ltd, a company that designed and distributed educational software to over forty countries worldwide. This company has now been ‘consumed’ by other companies.

So what? What is my point?

Well I guess this post is aimed at Lee and the company although I put it up on this forum in case anyone else would like to comment on it.
The seems the concept behind GameGuru is to have a game engine with all the ease of a WISIWIG word processor. And we all know how successful word processors have been. So the concept is a good and sound one. However, the easier you attempt to make the user interface the more demand there is on behind the scene processing. I was involved in the writing of a multi-level word processor that would lead students on to using MS Word and that took a team of three one and a half years to complete. So that’s four and a half years of man time. And that was a simple project compared to the demands of a fully WISIWIG game engine. Clearly GameGuru is not really a WISIWIG system but it comes pretty close. With a shallow learning curve demanded by the available tools in the authoring system, a stock of models representing static, animated and AI characters, scripts, music and sounds the designer has about 80% of the development time of the game for creation. If some rudimentary skills are added such as LUA scripting and simple model making the skies the limit.

Personally I have tried a good number of the other available game engines from the commercial units like Unreal and Unity to freebie jobs available around the web. Without doubt, none of them offer the intuitive user interface of GameGuru. Used in its simplest form to make a very basic game GameGuru is at this point untouchable. I personally believe the closest to it is Leadwerks and that misses the WISIWIG concept by a clear mile. However, I think GameGuru is around five years into creation now and it still fails on too many fronts to live up to a product that can deliver what it promises. I will not go into its failings here (failings is too hard a word really and should probably read none delivery) and required facilities such as lofts ETC.
Lee there are a huge number of wannabe game authors out there that lack the tools they need to put their so often great ideas into action. That means a big customer base. Many of these are not willing or able to take on the often steep learning curve required by most of the available engines. This is where GameGuru scores, and could score consistently. But as I understand it there is only one programmer working on GameGuru. So each man-year is just that. A whole year for one man to produce what he can in the way of coding alongside other demands made upon him. Most software usually continues to be improved (what we used to call bug fixes but now days is referred to as updates). However, there must be a cut-off date regarding its development period into what is seen as a fully working product. Personally, I cannot see this happening with GameGuru whilst the present one-man development team continues. Just a look at the Community Vote section gives an idea of the magnitude of the task.

OK suggestions (please feel free to add your own or tell me (nicely) you don’t agree.

The development team needs to be bigger. This has the obvious advantages of more hands to the tasks but also creates a working atmosphere of several minds which virtually always leads to better and more exciting solutions and developments.
So how to make the development team bigger. Several ways. The company invests in staff which they would only do if they are convinced the product under development has sufficient commercial potential. They would also need the required funds or access to funds also of course. They may take a cheaper alternative and have required subroutines written for them by outside agencies or individuals. At EduTech we adopted this method when time was pressing by using several companies in India. Superb programmers and relatively cheap in compared to employing programmers full time.
The third option I would put forward is to raise additional capital from the community. The initial EA payment was fairly low (I personally thought it was too low at the time considering the size of the product). Now I have not gone into the ins and outs of this additional investment from the community and clearly the original contract needs to be taken into consideration. But personally, if I was convinced that investing a given amount into the development of GameGuru would see it capable of supplying a proper release date not too far in the future, and an engine that delivers what GameGuru should. A fully working WISIWIG game engine that relied only on the imagination and rudimentary skills of the game author, rather like a writer’s role with his/her word processor. Then I’m all for that additional investment. Such an engine would spawn a whole industry of model developers, script writers, sound and music developers ETC.

Lee (and his team if it then existed) need to take ownership of the development of the product. By that I mean boards like the Community Vote are all well and fine but the essential point is a commercial company is producing a commercial product. As customers, we are entitled to say what we would like and a company should always listen to its customers but in the end the company should decide the route its product would follow. Now if it is correct in its analysis of the market then its customers would be happy with the ‘finished’ product. Put another way have faith in your original idea.

Thanks for reading.

Initially this was FPSCReloaded. A software to create first person perspective games. This has later been dropped to make an all round tool... but controlling characters has only been included rudimentary. The same result you got with a modded FPSC back in the day. Maybe diverting the focus from FPS to everything was a bit too much of a leap. Its too late now, I'm merely suggesting it.



I don't think this is a wise investment considering GG's current reputation, which worsens continually by ratio of bad games published (and hunted by youtube reactors for easy comedy fodder) in comparison to good games. TGC needs to survive as a company.



Those of us who have been around since day 1 might not be too pleased about this.



We'd have created a monster



Now and in the past, there was always a seemingly big uncertainty of what the products are supposed to be. FPSC started out as a toy engine to fill the gap between 3d game maker and dark basic pro and later became a mutation of an engine with lots of mods and addons being built upon an unstable base. GG also started out as some kind of sandbox game that geared itself more towards actual development later ?
So I'm not sure there is a clear vision from Lee but I'm pretty sure that most users have a different vision of what they want out of the tool.



-Wolf

Thanks Wolf for your comments. Can I just raise a couple points.



This seems to me to be saying the product is basically a dead duck. Without investment GG is just going to go on as it has and that will only worsen its reputation.



Just as a pointer I have been around since day one and was an EA of the original FPSC. A change of email meant I had to re-register six years ago. And I didn't say a compulsory further user investment so it would be up to the individual



Hope I haven't taken this quote out of context Wolf but if I understand you then there really needs to be a clear vision from the developer.

So the question is are we talking serious software here or a hobby?

In the past 3 weeks I have crunched very hard at LUA and managed to knock off many of the "features" off the voting list for myself. Which has been an incredible satisfactory feeling. As I feel less restricted than I did 3 years ago. This is all thanks to the freeing up the hardcoded elements so they can be edited in LUA. Some of which are crud and some are 100% functional. Haven't really slept much but this includes:

Day and Night cycles (complete with clock system for seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months & year)

- Complete weather system (13 varieties)
- Climb ladders
- Door and Switches
- Quests
- Stealth Mode
- Crawl Camo Mode
- Lean left and right
- XP Levels (with player stat bonuses)

I could complete ALL of the requested features related to weapons and magic if the weapons and projectile system gets loosened up form its hard-coded elements. I was quite depressed to find out how limited we were in this area when I started creating my own custom weapons and magic.

I think a lot of the LUA solvable requests should be lower on the list or worked on last.



At one point Rick mentioned something to do with a minecraft variant. Which I'm assuming is why Game Guru was thrown into the Games category at first when it hit Steam. Also the construction kit's early versions seemingly had a hammer and hands. I was about to pack my bags and leave the community around that time. Many arguments about the direction of which things which I was in disagreement with. Considering I was one of the backers of the failed Kickstarter attempt and then an actual gold backer of the internal alpha version. I felt like my money and ideas was part of the process. So the whole branding shift really disappointed me. Before Game Guru and FPSC Reloaded I still remember the first forum thread when we were asked where we should take FPSCx9. Improve upon it by recreating it from scratch. Community voted from scratch with a new scripting system and it later evolved from there.

I actually don't know what Game Guru itself intends to be, but for me its always been the 3rd version of FPS Creator. All I ever wanted was FPS Creator with a larger map and terrain editor. For over a decade. Got all of that now, but lost a lot the other features along the way and have had to wait years to get some of those back... most of the time i had to rally people through forum threads to get them. Which did inevitability work but left a bit of tension in the forums ever since.

Myself and a couple of the older veterans, were hoping most of the core items on the list would be taken care of before multiplayer, character creator and "construction kit". However, those 3 items were big selling points for newer customers on Steam... so they went ahead with those. I'm guessing someone made an investment into FPSC Reloaded and was owed back? In anycase, the 3 items resulted in more sales and new members to the community but also resulted in a lot of negative reviews for half finished features that were left behind. I feel once people had already paid for Game Guru their opinion at the time didn't really matter as much, as the goal was to get more customers. Then with the worry about having a fallout within the community, the voting board was created. Perhaps I'm wrong. But it felt like that.

I like where Game Guru is currently at. I feel there is less tension and more openness about the development and goal of Game Guru. I mean Lee even asked us the community how we should brand Game Guru's tagline. This isn't something any other game engine community operates. We should feel very lucky for where we are right now. I'm glad were past those shadow development days where we were had no idea what was going on with the product that we had invested so much time into supporting.

I don't mind helping Game Guru in any way I can. I tend to look for problems people may have within it, on Youtube and Steam and create solutions for them. Rather then just saying sorry, go learn LUA or sorry thats not possible right now. For example someone asked for a spell book pick up weapon that would give the player the ability to use the fire ball hands spell. So I created that within the span of only a few hours.

I also noticed dozens of people on Steam said there wasnt enough content to work with. So I went ahead and manually converted over 1000 old items for them. I think in a way Game Guru's production team involves some of the community members and their contributions.

Hi all

I was a bronze backer, but was actually about to go Gold when we changed the name to GG and it got put on Steam.

It is a shame that we have rubbish games getting put on Steam, which is actually a testament to Steams failure to provide a level of quality control for its customers.

The youtubers who chase games for easy comedy fodder are a disgrace imo, they obviously need to get a life, and they know that bad games made in any engine are not the fault of the engine. People can make bad games with any tool.

The damage done by those wannabes is however a problem for TGC and Game Guru, but I really can't see what you can do about it.

Except keep improving the engine.

Personally I think Game Guru is way under priced, and even after all this time, waiting for improvements that I would personally like to see that haven't yet been added, I would become a backer again especially if it meant more coders on the dev team.

Reliquia...

Thanks Teabone and reliquia for your great comments.



Agree with this one. Especially when there are programmers like you that can solve the problems. Do you sell or distribute these scripts?



I tend to agree with this. Either GG is a commercial product or it's a toy. What does the community want?

I'm torn with this one, on the one hand I totally get your point and to an extent agree, anything that can already be done doesn't need to be a feature request.

However, on the other hand if it can already be done with LUA then it shouldn't be a huge time drain for lee to get it out, so maybe he could just burn through a lot of these "features" in one go just to get them out of the way.

I can't decide which way to go ...

Seems that: "Ones imagination will always exceed the reality."

Thanks for the post and comments, a great read. My vision was to make it easy for anyone to create a 3D game, not necessarily for them to create top-draw AAA games that can compete with the premium offerings of major game developers. I had assumed this was implied, for when you've spent three decades coding and creating, you eventually forget how difficult and alien those first steps can be. Perhaps the smart move would have been to remove any ability to import and script, relying on drop-in features for common game mechanics, but I 'personally' wanted some creative control built-in so it could be expanded beyond its original programming. It has also become apparent that it will take a lifetime to completely finish a product that claims to make the creation of a great game "super easy", for as you know, producing a great game requires a lot of hard work, time, and money.

I have been sketching out how to present this apparent personality split in future updates to GameGuru, and the Steam product page in general. Something to separate and cater for users who want to drag and drop, only expecting a simple 3D game from their 5 minutes of experimenting, and users who appreciate that great original games require custom artwork, scripting and a whole lot of time to develop the game. By highlighting clearly these two routes to the exclusion of all other expectations, it 'may' discourage the expectation that choosing the easy route will lead to a game worthy of publication, something akin to the project you create for a school assignment vs something you create for a living.

That said, am I not discouraging those users somewhere in the middle, who enjoy creating games without worrying too much about original models or custom scripts, and have the future hope that one day their game can be sold. Is this something to be discouraged, given the very critical and often brutal nature of game critique these days (especially if you are charging for the game)?

If you booted up GameGuru as a new user, and the first welcome screen asked you to pick between ROOKIE MODE and PRO MODE, the first mode offering all the help, 6000MB of content, tutorials and game mechanics for the non-coder, non-modeler to learn the ropes, and then a second mode which strips out the 'stock' content, and left you to importing your own models and coding your own scripts. Would such a divide illustrate the point, or simply confuse the user?

I appreciate your thoughts on this and look forward to reading this thread on Wednesday when I am back in my office. I suspect the answer is in attempting to educate new users as much as possible, from the very first video, screenshot and product blurb they see, through to the experience of the software and how it lines up with the expectations that have been created up to that point (and of course, continue to make sure the engine looks good and runs fast - see my dev blog for further details of this part of the product that I DO have control over).

NOTE: I also liked the idea of using third-party LUA scripts to augment GameGuru and tick those features off the voting board, which was always my hope when I decided to allow the engine to be customized with LUA scripts and assets, and I would be interested to learn what you think the pros and cons are. In terms in man-years, it would certainly aid in redirecting my own energies to parts of the engine not easily reached by scripting

[href]null[/href]So what do we have so far.

Well it seems to me that Teabone has a good view of a way forward. I had a look at the Community Vote section and taking into account what scripts Teabone had already written plus those available in The Store and in the Scripting forum it seems quite a few 'wishes' could be solved that way. From what I read I think Lee feels this as well.

So why burden the main engine with unnecessary routines? Why divert valuable programming development time for them. The argument could be made that these routines should be part of the engine but surely then that could be extended to all manner of things. So my vote goes to agreeing with the two above people and saying scripts should be used where possible and therefore 'bolted in' to the finished game as and when required.

As a suggestion could I say Lee or someone else could visit the Community Vote board and mark all requests that have scripts already available such as Bolt Action Gaming's Advanced Time of Day control and Weather System ETC (preferably after they are tested in house and approved as filling the requirement). Also mark those requests that are solvable by scripting to maybe encourage scripters to produce the necessary. That could move GG on a fairly long way almost overnight (OK a bit of an exaggeration .

It would probably be worth a look at the entire Community Vote board to see if there are requests not possible through scripting at this stage that a couple of additional LUA commands could resolve. In that way not only is GG expanded with additional LUA commands but community requests are ticked off.

I know this is an the extra expense to GG users but I cannot really see this as any different from making purchases of entities, music, sound effects ETC. In the same way it is simply expanding the engine and allowing the designer to add only what is necessary for their finished product.

Over the past few short years GG has made great progress. But it has now reached the stage where the linear development route is no longer necessary. Thanks to the sensible decision of the community to vote for LUA and its current state in GG we can use the undoubted talents of some members to further develop the product. This is in all our interests.

I do have a number of other observations on the subject of this thread but will perhaps come back to them in a later post so as not to bore the reader.

In conclusion for now can I say there already exists a large, and I mean large market for software produced by GG and it is almost ready to access that market. The only thing preventing it a requirement for a few commands that would allow a more simple mouse interface. By that I mean the ability to move forward and backwards by mouse movement as well as turn left and right. Also the ability to program the mouse buttons. The market I am thinking of would benefit from a really simple interface.

With those facilities added this market is available right now for products made with the GG engine that only needs the research of customer needs and desires ETC to access. The usual standard practice if you want to produce a saleable product. If anyone is interested I could give the full SP on this in a later post. It is a market I thought of accessing a few years ago as an EA of FPSC but at that time research showed that particular engine did not reach the required flexibility to produce the goods. GG does.

Have fun.

Edit: Not advertising but here are a few products available in the store that greatly advance the GG system

http://https://www.tgcstore.net/pack/10738 rolfy's Interactive Starter Pack

https://www.tgcstore.net/product/30361 Bold Action Programming Time of Day and Weather System

https://www.tgcstore.net/product/24831 Saint Day and Night Cycle

https://www.tgcstore.net/product/24068 Acid Quest System (I have used this and it's good)

The biggest issue i see coming up is as Lee started the other post with, that this is supposed to be an easy game creator, that can do all manner of different game types and genres, however in reality, out of the box all it can do is a fairly rudimentary FPS and a VERY basic 3rd person, which to be honest really needs a lot of edge smoothing and many more features (things like being able to change weapons, having bullets fire in the direction the gun is pointing and not on the cursor which leads to shooting through entities etc). We need more genre types out of the box, because without them the description is perceived as a lie (even though most can be done by scripting, that's not what many people see, they see an engine that says it can do one thing, but can't).

Coupled with that, the fact that the default scripts leave a lot to be desired, they function, they do what they're supposed to, but the can be finicky, sometimes just not working, other times you have to mess around and tweak them to get them working. If you supply scripts with the product they should be ready to use out of the box without having to mess with them, one example is the music.lua system, it's really not obvious what you have to do, and expecting someone to go into the script and edit it so they can have their own music makes it more complicated than you want, not to mention there's not really much of a pointer as to how to use it, it took me ages to work out you don't actually use the music.lua in the level, but use the other scripts to reference it, this sort of thing seems to be a recurring theme here, and don't get me started on AI, there's been nothing but issue after issue with the AI scripts and AI behavior in general.

Hand in hand with the scripting issues, another thing that puts people off, is the over dependency of GameGuru on 3rd party software. I can understand that modelling shouldn't be done in the engine, that's a given, however if you want GameGuru to be a truly easy game maker then don't go sending them to notepad to edit scripts, add a script editor, some sort of node system or similar might make things seem easier. Likewise, importing models needs to be easier, we need to be able to import more file types, more poly's, and more bones, we also need the option to add a new model in the editor, and choose the textures there and then, with all its fpe options available in the properties panel.

And finally, half finished features, this is a huge issue, some great features have been added to gameguru over time, but many of them feel like they've been coded up to the point where someone's said "yeah that'll do, it's good enough", a prime example is the character creator, i see so many people asking how to bring in characters etc, but they won't use the creator because it's just so limited, and to be honest all its characters pretty much look the same with different clothes and colours, the reason people are trying to import 3rd party characters is because they don't want all their characters to look the same, much more variety is needed for the character creator to actually be viable, many more interchangeable body parts, not just head, body, pants etc. but actual limbs; arms, legs, torso, hair etc. and sliders to adjust their sizes.

Anyway, that's my two penneth, and how i perceive that gameguru can be improved and made "easier", many might disagree, but that's my opinion.

And a good one as well.

Lot's of good ideas there. I like the idea of an inbuilt script editor and that is something that could be added in no time at all.

Yeah, I agree with Belidos.

The whole concept of this engine is meant to be ease of use, and the name change was because the target was for all kinds of games.

There are quite a few things that detract from a well rounded out product at this time. Save Standalone is one of the biggest show-stoppers Game Guru has atm.

Belidos touched on sound, which surely should be easier than it is. Maybe it is fine, but without documentation, good luck working out the correct way to use it.

Some scripts work for the most part but not as they should.
For example the stock door scripts have issues. While you can open and close a door, once you have opened\closed it you can shoot it till the cows come home but the bullets don't register a hit. Now I am not really into the FPS type games - like they have been done to death already - and don't particularly want to go around shooting doors, but that is not the point. The scripts do not function correctly, and as already pointed out stock scripts should work - period.

How can anyone use them as a learning tool if they don't work properly. Of course if they are properly constructed scripts that should work, then the engine needs to be told that somewhere.

The other thing to me is so many things should already be in the engine; driving vehicles, flying planes, riding in boats, changing night and day, sun direction, water rise\fall. Now I know these things are on the voting board, but honestly, until things like that are added Game Guru is still just FPSC Reloaded, just for making first person shooters, but unfortunately with AI that is anything but intelligent.

These things should have been in before changing the name to Game Guru, and most definitely before going on Steam.

But again we come to point that while Lee is a super-coder, he is but one man, and while he has every intention of adding these things it will take time. The more time it takes the more disappointed buyers you will get, and of course the more bad reviews.

More coders would help get Game Guru where it is intended to go.

Just my thoughts, probably not much use, despite it's failings I love messing with Game Guru.

Just sayin is all

Reliquia....

Guys, don't forget that it's only 1 man, who's doing all the engine programming, Lee. (Correct me, if I'm wrong)
But I also agree, that GG has a few little problems, like unfinished features (character creator, multiplayer)

The multiplayer is useless at the moment, you can not expect from the player, that he owns GG to play your multiplayer game, that makes no sense.

Another thing the broken AI, with the latest version useless at the moment.
The AI from the February version has problems too, characters are jumping over buildings, trees... What I want to say is, please don't release extreme buggy versions... And half finished new features

But well, anyway I will continue using GG for a long time. it's easy to use.

Hi,

Multiplayer has never worked for me. it is another one of those additions that took a while to add but doesn't seam to work for most of us.

Edit: I think all the issues pointed out in this thread just add weight to grobyken op. More coders = more production and solutions to existing issues.

As I said before Lee is but one man - although he is a super coder - this is perhaps too big for one man to complete in any timely fashion

Reliquia....

Grobyken,


Really ? Seeing my own experience with offshoring to India would let me be VERY wary of giving GG to India.
The one thing that is true is that they are low-cost.
BUT: according to my experience (and that was with very widely used standard software), they need VERY precise information / documentation on what to do. Now, there is nothing against a good technical indepth documentation.... but are we sure it exists for GG - in a form suitable to externals?

With big standard software, there usually is a least good documentation available.
Those Indians may also be good at programming something from scratch, if you provde them with a sound concept.
But with a totally unique thingy like GG ?

I am also not sure how many GameEngine Design & Development Experts are available for offshoring in India.

The one single major thing I could imagine handing over to them is a conversion to 64 BIt, which is a lot of work, but one may not have to have an indepth understanding of the workings of the engine.

And, of course, they might provide cost-effective solutions for the integration of many little things, as for example the long-desired entity database integrated in the Editor, and other helpful tools. Nevertheless, again, they would need to have a clear concept of what exactly to do.

And, in the end, someone at TGC will have to cope with what is delivered from India, in future times... could pose a little challenge, too.
Just my 2 cents

Here is all that is needed for GG to be great

Working AI.
It's just random luck at the moment that AI will work or even continue to work on a level We need rock solid performance. Hills on a terrain should not be an issue and even worse, stop working after they have been working fine for some time previously.
Functional 3rd person.
Support for all weapon types, better camera/player controls. I find the current setup for 3rd person to be very unsatisfactory. More options are needed here, either with lua or in editor. We need more than one basic attack for starters.
Improved Character Creator.
A much more functional and expanded character creator. Variable height and weight of characters would seriously improve it as the way to get characters into GG quickly and easily. Support for all weapon types would be wanted as well. More hair types are needed badly as well, the current selection is somewhat limited.
Better Physics support.
At least by default, physics seems somewhat watered down in GG, at least using default models. For instance drop a barrel onto a slight slope in GG and it will resolutely fail to roll down to crush your enemies. No playing with settings seems to improve this that I have found. I'm sure people would have lot's more fun if GG's physics was a little more realistic. I mean I always have fun with such things Who wouldn't enjoy bowling down several orcs with a huge boulder
Faster Loading and Standalone support.
Nuff said.
Stability.
This needs to be improved from the current release. Older builds had this under control, but the latest couple of updates seem to have upset something.

That's about it really. Other improvements can be made of course, but these are the main gripes that once addressed will truly make GG an easy game maker. Things like a lua editor are nice, but really something to be added at a much later date by comparison to basic functionality and Speed

I'm not saying these things are easy, but they would certainly improve GG if they were all checked off the list sooner rather than later I'd be happy if AI and stability were fixed really, but the other stuff would make GG really nice to use

Once these are working well, we can then think about vehicle support and other juicy stuff

Still looking forward to the DX11 update though

Hi yrkoon



Sorry I thought I said look at external programming to solve required routines, DLLs ETC. I agree with you regarding the foolishness of handing a half complete program over to an external developer.

At Edutech we had no trouble with the coders in India but that may be because we used them through a broker based in the USA. They worked to specific instructions supplied by our company and were tasked with producing routines that fulfilled specific tasks.

I have put forward a number of ways that GG development could be speeded up as have others above but this outsourcing is one of the cheaper methods.

Agree regarding the 64 bit conversion. A nasty job but fairly routine in its nature.

1 - Software projects go to India to DIE.....R.I.P - "Adobe Director". (January 27, 2017) and Adobe has Millions to work with and scores of programers.
2 - Once you loose control of your source code (outsource) it and your concepts die. (Vision is key.)
3 - Speed is not = to Quality.
4 - Aspects of GG need to be as "Lego Like" as possible without sacrificing personal customization, extend-ability, Versatility, Stability. (Key to Features)

As stated in another thread:

GG is a wonderful "Gaming Canvas": OUT OF THE BOX: "Striving to be as easy as possible...IN TIME AND WITH EFFORT: "As complex as YOU make it."

----------
The "Included Samples" that come with GG should reflect/showcase a range of "styles": FPS, Multiplayer, Top Down, Scroll 2D, 2.5D, Quest, Drive, Fly ECT. Then showcase its feature set: EBE, Character Creator, "Entity DB", Terrain Maker, Terrain Brushes, Light Ojects, Win Zone, Trigger Zone, Sound Zone, Story Zone, Floor Zone, Checkpoint, Debuging frame rates, Fexible Skyboxes...etc. (Tools that make putting together a game right down to atmosphere "easier".

All discussions seem to condense to #4 above do they not? At least this seems to encapsulate the larger picture of features/tools.

This may actually be possible. I think I'll do some tests around a trap that holds a bunch of boulders that when released hurts the player or enemies if in contact with them while falling. Here is a quick example of the rolling functions in GG. It requires a bit of messing around with the physics options in the FPE settings. Allows for barrels and balls to roll.



This requires making sure you have the correct collision type set for its shape and adjusting the physical friction and weight of objects. Took me about 5 to 10 minutes to get it right. The ball consistently rolls due to a test i was doing around constant motion for a possible 3D pinball system. To also replicate some in-game games like these:

That's a good example Teabone. I've had success in the past messing with the actual objects FPE file, some rolling logs I believe, back when GG was Reloaded. However, there should be default objects that will work this way. People would be way more impressed if the physics of objects worked out the box. The need to have all or most objects as collision boxes (for performance reasons) however, ruins it's fun potential. Some way in editor to improve collision properties would be way cooler. Editing FPE files is of course one of the things that drive people crazy when they have been told GG is an easy game maker.

I must admit although I have no real issues with editing FPE's, I find it very cumbersome. For instance you have set up the FPE of a default object for one game which is fine. Then you come to another you are working on and suddenly the FPE is not suitable. So you edit it back. Go back to the other game and crap, the FPE is wrong Obviously the more titles you play about with the worse it gets. This means you tend to have to make duplicates of the objects when you do this.; which I hate, as my GG folder just keeps on growing and after awhile you have several clones of the same objects all over the place; I think my GG folder is way over 10 gig now.

In any other programming language the model would never contain information that changes from game to game and be use-able for as many games as you want with no worries about duplicating files all over the place. That sort of info is added in the actual program itself. It's a legacy of FPSC which I really am not keen on. Although, last time I tried it Unreal (seems) to store duplicates of objects for each project as well, although this is automatic. Still I didn't like that much either

If people ( especially newcomers) could load up GG, drop some objects in and create some nice physics interactions without any messing about they would be way more impressed than they would be as it stands. Especially if it could trigger a trap or such without having to script anything Physics is way under used. I mean I have often seen doors criticised for lacking any collision when open. That is because the system is extremely simplistic here and simply disables collision for an open door and enables it when closed. Now if the doors used physics they would be much, much better. This old disable collision after so long to fake the doorway is old hat these days. Animations never work with physics, meaning you have to make sure the player can't get close enough when it animates, which I'm sure everyone has come across who has used GG for any time.

So many ways to improve GG with better physics support In fact, if you did manage to make physics more utilised and simple to use GG would get some serious Kudos I believe. Physics can be pretty complicated to get working, even with full coding support. Making something with easy to use physics would be fairly unheard of. For me anyway

Absolutely agree with the FPE issue Dvader.

Ideally what we need is a system where the FPE only contains hard coded information such as animation ranges etc. EVERYTHING else should be controlled via the properties panel.

The properties panel should be an intuitive drop down system, starting with a single drop down for the type of entity (ie character, basic, etc. basically a shader list in readable options), then that would open up more drop downs specific to that type, including an option to choose the texture, physics, audio, and so on, effectively adding every fpe setting to the properties panel in an intuitive way.

This would make things much easier for users and make entities infinitely more customization directly from inside gameguru without having to mess with files.

Grobyken

Not sure what you mean by that, are you talking of "Plug-Ins" ? What is in a dll is only up to the developer, it can be anything,
from core functionality to peripheral things. I HOPE GG is not one monster of a single block of code.



I think we both are looking at the same things, here.
The foolishness on the "western mens' " side mainly lies in the misconception that one can "throw a bucket of code adorned with some additional requirements" over the fence to those Indians and - as some managers usually seem to be expecting - to get something useful back, and cheap, at that.

So, I wasn't implying that all those Indians be bad developers. The single most annoying thing with them may be their "No problem, Sir! " mindset to problems they should know they cannot handle - or, some of them can't.



Yes, I totally concur, and it is great that you have issued your thoughts on that.

My point was only that one has to think about what exactly can be outsourced, and how, else, money will be blown out of the window.

More coders also means more wages

Dave

I have this problem too. I have many clones entities with slightly modified FPE files. Not a huge problem as I think it be hard to change collision shapes on the fly within the engine and things like that. But as mentioned above there could be more FPE options that are also in the properties panel in the engine.

Dave

I guess that was Grobyken's point when he suggested offshoring to India, thus avoiding legal bindings of long-term employments.

Lets be real, one coder is a joke and always has been. The only way to get this product out of alpha and and out of the drudges is to have more coders. At least one more for the love of Pete.

In the end it comes down to money,who is going to pay for a extra coder.

Dave

Lee.

There have been a lot of really good comments and suggestions on this subject now and since your original comment on the thread.

So can you or a colleague put aside a few minutes to perhaps give us the company view. Many thanks.

And thanks to all you guys that have contributed some good stuff to this thread and those of you that have made the time to read it.

Lee.

There have been a lot of really good comments and suggestions on this subject now and since your original comment on the thread.

So can you or a colleague put aside a few minutes to perhaps give us the company view. Many thanks.

And thanks to all you guys that have contributed some good stuff to this thread and those of you that have made the time to read it.

Edit. Sorry don't understand why this double posted. My computer just updated with this latest Windows 10 thing MS has been banging on about over the last couple of months and when it came back there were two posts. Probably not connected but you never know.

Just as a sideline Window updates do sometimes throw a spanner in the works of third-party software as does other third-party software that has been badly written.

If that is true, then there are quite some similar jokes around.
And, on the other hand, the multi-multi-multi developer engines often are said to require multiple game developers/designers per project to make any effort of using them worthwhile.

Something in between. Its a small, innovative project from a small company developed, mostly, by one man. I can see Ravey or someone else at TGC join in the project and I can also see more community involvement (like Preben's Shaders) to further the project but I don't see any new hirings and I definitely don't see any outsourcing happening.

I'm no inside man though, this is just my assumption.



Of course not! Being able to do this is a major selling point, I believe Its just an unfortunate turn of events that the initial bad performance combined with some sub-par releases on steam have made a strong impression on people of what game guru is like. That there are indeed more possibilities is often overlooked.



User made plugins have been beneficial to every software I used so far. They do, of course, always need to be optional



-Wolf

I can confirm that it is unlikely I will outsource GameGuru development, it would take me longer to explain the system that it would be to make the changes myself. For a good frame of reference, sit down and write an entire game engine from scratch using your own graphics engine, then sit back and see just how vast it is The closest I could get to outsourcing is to open source the GameGuru source code, and I think we are some way off that route. More coders on my team would certainly help, but it boils down to funding, and I am already reinvesting everything GameGuru makes back into the project to keep it going and improving. Unfortunately, it is a slow process when you grow organically.

On the other subjects, you'll get no argument from me on the ideas offered, as they are born from using GameGuru for real projects and I value the feedback. I am sure we can make some headway on the smaller tasks once the 'monster' graphics overhaul task is behind us.

Well good: Yes, feedback is key and real projects the community is working on in GG as: "growing organically" is a great observation. (GG Loader).

1) I think we all must consider lessons of failure/success based on the big guys. Adobe Macromedia
The software ecosystem for GG must continue to be sustainable and not as overreaching as possible. Infinite funds does not always lead to infinite results. It seems to me that "sustainability" continues through Lee/senior members/community input/ 3rd party extendibility etc. GG needs to morph into the most optimal "healthy" game tool as possible. Regarding this, we all have different opinions and threads like this are invaluable at triangulating "Ideas vs Reality" in achieving goals.

......some how GG needs some larger realism to set in in connection with App game Kit and that particular market. (Preben Eriksen) - GG Loader has the right vision.

2) The linked article here, fails to talk about "outsourcing woes aspect. I know Macromedia was outsourced to India which led to promising software/ and its forward thinking concepts within the app market dying. I might add it continued to fail as it was targeted by Apple interests and others definitely not linked to collaborative spirit . (He/she that controls the code controls the world.)

3) Once you lose control of your source code (outsource) it [or add too many additional programmers] your concepts die. First, like Lee said Just try to explain the vastness of the core programming to someone. Then, imagine Lee losing control himself with exponential complexity factoring in by adding more than another programmer. Aspects, of GG would begin to bifurcate needing to be segmented/branched out with increasing complexity.

Here I feel I must add one thought: (Analogy) The Beatles would not be the Beatles without the core members. Unfortunately, collaborative genius ends mostly badly and quickly. (I know this is a FACT in collaborative programming too.)

Lee has said this and all of you know: "Making a game is hard. Making a GOOD game is harder....NOW making an encompassing tool to MAKE a game (Engine/Squared) is one step away from pure full on AI.

As Lee states, let the monster of the Graphics to DX11 be gone and on to the next adventure.

the simple sensation of firing up a new flat level, jotting down some assets,sounds and trigger zones and then walk around to adjust terrain texture,color and weather and stuff is magical. that is where game guru shines and excels.
i have great difficulty with scripting - i´m a visual artist. thats why i bought game guru but script-wise i can only use what Game Gurus offers ready to use- and there isn't much on offer to make a good game.
instead of visual improvements i would expect more "ready to use scripts" and game-play options that are truly easy to implement.

hope the game wont be split into a noob and pro version.
and maybe game guru should focus on one genre at a time. ( first get fps right then move on to third person etc.)